It is my belief that Polynesia has much to teach us if we are
prepared to open our eyes along with our minds. In traditional Polynesia Society
children enjoy the sort of happy, carefree childhoods Western children could
barely imagine. Firstly the environment is a tropical paradise of lagoon, sea,
reef, beach and luxurious vegetation. Children are free range with little constraint,
because as with most indigenous societies in Polynesia children are regarded
as independent individuals with Free Will, not the property of parents. That
is not to say that children do not help with chores around the house or in the
growing of food, on the contrary most children learn to be helpful and useful
members of society from a very young age. Families are exactly that multi-intergenerational,
with grandparents playing active roles in rearing children, as do older children
parent their younger siblings. Seeing girls of thirteen with a child carried
on their hip is a normal sight in Polynesia, but the child is not her own rather
her youngest sister. Again there is something very Asian about traditional Polynesian
culture.

When visiting Polynesia children are often the most striking
and obvious human presence and your first inkling of the difference between
Western Society and that of Polynesia. Firstly they are so obviously open and
friendly and it would require a very hardened heart indeed not to take delight
when driving around rural Samoa where almost every child will smile and wave.
These are unspoilt examples of humanity living within Nature and a painful reminder
of the cloistered and confined and fearful lives of children in the West. It
is the unrestrained nature of childhood in Polynesia that produces such beautiful
examples of human children and if we visit Polynesia with an open and enquiring
mind as well as discovering the unexpected pleasure in something as simple as
a child's smile, we find ourselves drawing an unhappy comparison to the lack
of innocence in the lives of the children in our own society.

I would not wish to suggest that this idyllic version of Polynesian
childhood is universal. I only intend to discuss my own country, but I suspect
that urban Hawaii would be a parallel. In New Zealand we have appalling levels
of child abuse in all its many repellent forms, and unfortunately the Polynesian
sections of our community are over represented in these statistics. But rather
than disproving my version of Polynesian childhood these statistics prove my
point, as it is I suggest the influence of the European on Maori and Pacific
communities that produced this calamity. This poison was introduced to Polynesian
societies by, you guessed it, the same people who sailed from England, America
and France in the 19th Century with the express purpose of destroying every
other vestige of Polynesian Culture; the missionaries. The killing of children
of a defeated race is and always has been the sign of a barbaric invader. That
Polynesian childhood was also the target of Christian missionaries goes without
saying. What else could be expected of these black clad, self hating, sexually
repressed, narrow minded vultures? Spare the rod and spoil the child would have
been their mantra. What joy must have sprung from their savage hearts at the
thought of laying the strap of those little brown bodies. What hidden sexual
pleasures and fantasies they must have harboured on the long journey across
oceans of frustration only to fall upon the innocents children of the Pacific.
So far from England, so isolated, and safe from discovery, what a perfect paradise
for the pedophile latent or otherwise. So they taught Polynesians to beat their
children something unknown in traditional Polynesian society. Just how much
this caught on depended on the extent to which Polynesians clung to their own
culture. Across Polynesia this would vary to an enormous degree, but in New
Zealand where dislocation is common, where the people were robbed of their land,
by State violence, by greed, by folly, by persuasion, by the thousand ways a
people can be disposed or dispossess themselves, there the innocents paid the
price. Of course once this poison enters the body of a people it replicates
itself generation after generation a, and if we add alcohol then we are on our
way to an endemic of child torture and abuse.

Now every year within our Maori population the sad statistics of death by fathers,
step fathers and sadder still by mothers continues. Infanticide always had a
role in traditional Polynesian societies, but it always had a reason within
that society and was sanctioned because of that. It was not however and never
was the result of passion or viciousness or drunken violence. Tribal societies
often had to make hard decisions on the subject of life and death. Generally
a child born with a deformity was not allowed to live. To our eyes this may
seem cruel, but was the reality of the all of humanity until very recently.
However, these acts were acts protected by custom, and behind the custom was
generally reason. Our own cruelty is also protected by custom. Not physical
child abuse, but that also only recently lost its dispensation, but there are
other more subtle forms of torture and other ways of denying childhood happiness.

But in traditional Polynesian society, the idyllic version
of childhood is alive and is the reality of the Polynesian World. And further
is there for us to study and emulate, there alive and free to be exported to
our own countries, we who are so myopic to our own particular version of ritualised
cruelty to children. Of course to do so we must be prepared to ask ourselves
questions that are very likely to produce bitter answers. Are Modern Western
women prepared to accept their role in the fact that fifty percent of children
grow up in a household without their biological father? I see no evidence of
this. Are we as a people prepared to examine our personal behaviour and our
own values and find them wanting? I see little evidence of this either. Are
men in Western Society prepared to live their lives primarily as good role models
to their children, to their nieces and nephews, to the kids next door? I doubt
it based on the evidence of my own eyes. Yet if we a not surely we must ever
give up the notion of a happy childhood becoming the norm. The result will be
overflowing jails, crime, suicide, mental illness, unproductive members in our
society and huge amount of self perpetuating human unhappiness. Which is just
exactly what we have now.

Sales Enquires This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Academic, Insitutional and Artist Enquires This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Unfortunately due to being a small institution without paid staff we have no
facility to answer general inquiries or comments.